The present invention relates to industrial automation. More specifically, the present invention relates to offline mobile RFID event persistency and synchronization.
In general, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology for labeling and auto-sensing the identity of any physical object. Lately, this technology has been widely applied in the industries of supply chain management, retail, asset management, life science and healthcare, manufacture WIP (Work-In-Process) part tracking, etc.
Typically, mobile RFID refers to the technology of building an RFID interrogator to the mobile or handheld devices for collecting data at any time in any place. This expands the collection of RFID data and object visibility to much larger areas. However, in locations without any network coverage, a mobile interrogator/reader cannot transmit the data to a backend server immediately after the collection.
Additionally, most mobile RFID applications attempt to compensate for offline data collecting by storing RFID events in local files on the mobile or handheld devices. For example, a mobile RFID reader may read the Electronic Product Code (EPC) from an RFID tag and generate an RFID event that includes the EPC, a timestamp, and the source of the event. The source of the RFID event may be the mobile reader and the antenna that read the tag (if more than one). However, there is no straightforward and efficient mechanism to search for certain identification data from these local files, as each mobile reader may use a different format to store offline RFID events. Also, the data stored in the files needs to be copied to the backend server when the mobile or handheld device is again connected to the network. This is a non-trivial and error-prone process due to the data integrity, filtering, uniqueness, and other requirements by a data hub collecting RFID data from multiple sources.
Accordingly, what is desired are improved methods and apparatus for solving the problems discussed above. Additionally, what is desired are improved methods and apparatus for reducing some of the drawbacks discussed above.